God Had a Plan from the Beginning

 The Sunday before the Nativity of Christ

Troparion: Bethlehem, make ready, for Eden has been opened for all. Ephrathah, be alert, for the Tree of Life has blossomed forth from the virgin in the cave. Her womb has become a spiritual paradise wherein the divine Fruit was planted, and if we eat of it we shall live and not die like Adam. Christ is coming forth to bring back to life the likeness that had been lost in the beginning. 

Heb 11:9-10,17-23,32-40

Matt 1:1-25

I love the Troparia the Church gives us.  They have some real meat in them.  Sure, we have the cycle of the eight Resurrectional Troparia, and it’s easy to take them for granted. “Oh, yeah, we sang that before”.  But then, along come the feasts, and we get the opportunity to learn something new. And they often show us that God had a plan from the beginning.

This one sets the whole coming of Christ against the backdrop of mankind’s fall as told in the opening chapters of Genesis.  God had created man in his image and gave him stewardship over the entire world. And he only gave one command.  Don’t eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. 

The Bible tells us that the Serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals that God had made. And this particular serpent was a mouthpiece for Satan.  And Satan knew that that human destiny was, in fact, to become like God.  So he twisted God’s command, not much, but just enough so that Eve ate the fruit.  She was deceived, but Adam willingly went along with it.  And they lost spiritual life and were barred from the garden. An angel guarded the entrance.

But the troparion tells us that today, Eden has been opened for all! The Tree of Life has been restored to all. The Birth of Christ re-opened Eden for mankind.

And that was God’s plan from the beginning!!!

Matthew’s Gospel was written for the Hebrew people, and they knew their history. So, rather than being a dry list of names, the genealogy I just read to you shows that Jesus is the missing piece of the puzzle, the long awaited Messiah whom they’d been anticipating for centuries. 

That was God’s plan from the beginning.

In Genesis, we read God making a covenant with Abraham. 

God’s first promise was that Abraham’s descendants were to be like the number of stars in the sky. 

The second promise was that, although they would be slaves for 400 years in an alien land, eventually they would come out of that land with great possessions. If you’ve read the book of Exodus, or seen the movie, “The Ten Commandments”, you know that that’s exactly what happened.

The second son, Jacob, of Abraham’s second son, Isaac, became the child of this promise.  And it is through that son, later known as Israel, that God sent the Messiah.

The third part of God’s promise is yet to be fulfilled. Abraham’s descendants would occupy the land from the Nile River in Egypt to the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in modern day Iraq, and as far north as modern day Turkey.  God told him that his descendants would occupy the whole world, at least as much as Abraham could conceive. That will happen when the whole world becomes Christian, because we, as Christians, are part of the New Covenant that God has made with Israel.

That has been God’s plan from the beginning.

The genealogy continues down to David. There are three women mentioned in that lineage, and they are not Hebrew women, but Gentiles. Rahab was a Canaanite woman, Ruth a woman of Moab, and Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah, was a Hittite. God always planned to include Gentiles in His Kingdom - first in the Kingdom of Israel, and now in the Church.

Just as He had made a covenant with Abraham, so God made a covenant with David. A descendant of David would rule over the house of Israel forever.  And that’s what the genealogy shows - Jesus is the legal heir to the throne of David. Even though he was not the blood son of Joseph, he was the legal son. It’s Luke’s genealogy that shows Jesus was descended through a different line from David.

And don’t you know that God always chooses the right person for His plans.  

Look at Joseph. Not only was he heir to David’s throne, but we can see here that he was a good man.  Learning that Mary was pregnant, he didn’t want to humiliate her. He didn’t want to have her stoned, even though the Law of Moses would allow it. No, he was a righteous man, a merciful man, and he chose to divorce her quietly - that is, until he learned that the child was conceived of the Holy Spirit.

And then look at Mary.  We get more details of this in Luke’s Gospel.  When Gabriel greets her, he calls her kecharitomene - a word not otherwise found in Greek literature.  It means “female for whom the reception of grace has been completed” - in other words, Full of Grace; it is a clear indication that she is the Immaculate Conception, conceived without Original Sin. 

When that Archangel Gabriel told her that she would become the Mother of God, she responded by saying, “Be it done unto me according to your word”.  St Irenaeus says, “If the former Eve disobeyed God, the latter Eve, Mary, was persuaded to be obedient to God…. And thus as the human race fell into bondage by means of a virgin, so it is rescued by a virgin”.

Not only man’s perdition, but the fallen state of creation was brought about by the disobedience of the first Eve and Adam, and the restoration of man and creation is being brought about by the New Eve and Adam, by her obedience, and his Incarnation, Death, and Resurrection.

That, my brothers and sisters, is what we are celebrating.

God had a plan from the beginning - and it includes each one of us!

REJOICE!!